65 things I want to say but never have

When I was 15, I was in the French Alps on a skiing trip as part of my private school's French exchange program during spring vacation. We were staying in a hostel coincidentally at the same time as a group of young French agricultural students who were college-aged and gregarious. There was one of them whom, peering at several times when I thought he wasn't looking, I had identified to be quite cute.

I was an awkward 15 as so many girls are - suddenly filled with hormones that swelled my body from its straight athleticism to a curved femininity that I worked to hide by wearing my older brother's hand-me-down jeans and large flannel shirts. While so many of the girls in my class, or so it seemed, knew exactly what to do with their hair and clothes, with their gestures and speech, I constantly felt lost and so I shied away from social interaction beyond my small reliable group of friends. My friends were that rare breed of high schoolers who could interact with peers from all of the other class cliques and not be 'marked down' for it in the eyes of the most popular kids. So when my friends were invited to the popular kids' weekend parties, I too would sometimes go, though I mostly stood with them or by myself, and looked for opportunities to pick up beer cans and clean up at the end of the night so I would have something to do.

Of course I wanted to be desired. I wanted to be seen as pretty. I wanted to laugh and talk and be at ease like the most popular girls who, by doing so, seemed even more alluring. I wanted to be chosen by one of the boys in our class, but after some awkward school dances where I gently tested out whether a crush I had was mutual, I came to the conclusion that I was not any of these things and slunk further into the social shadows.

Being in another country divides self from self. I was very nervous about the quality of my French, but I also felt freed from the person I was back in high school and the way I assumed I was perceived by my peers. So when the hostel hosted a dance party one night and the French farmers decided to join, I let loose dancing to Kiss' "Rock and Roll All Nite" as I never would have back home. The cute farmer I'd noticed earlier smiled and danced closer to me and I felt on top of the world.

The next day I found out that the agricultural students were going to be staying in the hostel all day and I somehow informed my teachers that I would not be going skiing that day. I can't recall if I said I was sick or injured or what, but I remember the lie because I was not the type of girl, the type of student, the type of daughter to do so.

I sat in my room reading and listening on my walkman to the Led Zeppelin mix tape I had brought. I even skipped meals to make sure I was there and didn't miss any visitors. At some point there was a knock on my door and when I opened it, the cute farmer stood in the doorway. It was like magic. And in my naive teenage brain, it felt like magic was possible here, away from all I knew and all that knew me, in the snow-filled, sun-glinting spiked Alps where French women sat at lunch halfway up the ski slope with their Bogner ski overalls zipped down to their waists, bikini tops bared, reveling in the spring sun that bounced off the ice and sky melting snow and clothing and conversation. Yes, magic seemed like it could happen...even to me.

And so I let him sit on my bottom bunk and close the door. And so I tried to speak with him in halting French and then halting English. And so I let him start to kiss me and then push me down on the bed and then force his hand down my pants and then inside of me. I don't remember if I tried to say no. I don't know if I was too scared or too surprised or too seemingly ungrateful. But, to this day, I remember how wrong it felt, how wrong it was, only recognizing this fact many decades later as an adult after other violations and abuse.

I was naive. I also wanted to be so many things at once - the proper upright daughter, the soft-spoken acquiescent girl, and also the girl who a boy just might choose. I was so naive that, after returning home to the U.S., I called the French farmer. God, I was terrified. I did not call boys, certainly not boys thousands of miles away who hardly spoke the same language...but I thought that what had happened meant that he cared for me deeply in some way, that perhaps he even loved me and we might have a future together. The ridiculousness of this thought is hard for me to comprehend now, but I believed his violation of me could not be wrong. I believed that I was too inexperienced and too afraid and finally, most painfully for me to think about now, that a young man would never touch a girl that way unless there were deeper, more meaningful feelings that lay beneath.

No, there were not. Our one-time crackling phone line conversation, where I first had to work my way past his mother, felt like a first-year French lesson. "Quel temps faut-il?" "Frais." "Comment ça-va?" "Bien bien..." Pause, pause, pause. "Tu te manques." "Le même."

I hung up with an emptiness. I told him to call me, but he never called back. Neither did I.

This week, with the Kavanaugh hearings, with the broadcast of the once-silenced voice of Dr. Blasey Ford, I have felt beaten, broken, and dismissed. I have questioned what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a woman in this country. I have peered into the murk of my own past and found, despite my strength, my bravery, my independence, there is much that I have never said. This is not about the narcissism of me me me or an argument that every thought I've ever had is momentous and worthy enough of speaking to the world. This is about the things I have not said because I have been silenced, because - so many times - I have silenced myself, so well-inculcated I was to the expectations of what it meant to grow up as a girl and then a woman of my era - to be restrained, controlled, deferring, yielding, accepting. This is about speaking what I should have said but never have.

1. You are wrong, Dad, I am not reaching for a snack because I am upset I didn't make the Varsity soccer team, I am eating because I have not eaten all day and I have the right to basic sustenance.

2. Dr. Vinton, yes I weight too little but it is not going to help to see a nutritionist and make a food journal. I know what to eat, I know what is healthy. I am not eating because I want to melt away, I want to avoid having to be heard, I am afraid of having a voice and making a stir.

3. Mom, lots of the girls in our high school are having sex and I don't know if that is okay and I don't know what to think about that really. I don't know if I am supposed to want that too, or if it is too soon, or how I should feel since no one seems to want to do it with me anyway.

4. I would like to make a comment in this class, but the interrupting and raised voices of the boys makes it nearly impossible.

5. It is not okay for you to grab my arm when I get up to leave the table, Dad; I am allowed to choose to leave because I don't want to listen anymore to you rage with your frankly racist disapproval at my Haitian boyfriend. And who are you to say he is not 'good enough' for me?

6. In de Kooning, Mr. Pollans, I do see violence towards women. It scares me and whether that is because it is truly there or because of the position I am in in the world, I do not know. But I know that it still matters.

7. Yes, Grandma, I am too thin. Don't you see it? It is still frightening to be a girl in the world. Maybe if I turn sideways, no one will notice me.

8. I am uncomfortable at this college because the social life centers on fraternities and binge drinking and the hope of a guy 'hooking up' with you and I am afraid of that.

9. I am going away, not because I do not love my family, nor because I am not serious about a life path, but because I am having so much trouble finding my voice. I do not know what I want, what I think, or how I feel. I need to understand these things in order to move forward in my life with any meaning.

10. I am 27 years old and I have never had sex, but I have been violated before.

11. You are an undocumented immigrant and my family does not approve of me seeing you, but I am choosing you to have sex with because you are gentle and loving towards me and I know the experience will be one of tenderness and shared understanding.

12. Thank you for showing me sex can be sweet and soft and not always full of domination and submission.

13. You do not need to apologize, you do not need to feel ashamed for not being able to keep an erection. Giving me great sex is not the most important thing to me in our relationship.

14. You have not earned the right to anal sex with me just because you paid for dinner and drove me home.

15. Just because we are dating, you do not have the right to ask me about how many sexual partners I have had and judge whether or not I am a 'whore' based on the answer.

16. I do not want to be called 'your little whore' in bed.

17. Stop forcing my head onto your penis.

18. I do not like being choked. It does not turn me on. It scares me because I can't breathe.

19. You do not 'own' me just because we had sex more than once.

20. I told you no, you pushed me forward and forced yourself into me anyway. You raped me. That is rape.

21. It makes me feel dirty and demeaned when you rub cum on my face.

22. When I come to visit your apartment, and first thing in the door, you force me onto my knees and make me give you head, I do not like it.

23. Thank you for not having sex with me that one night we spent together. I think you may have thought about trying, but you didn't and I cherish your respect for me.

24. I called the police when we got back to the hotel, but I should have come right up to you on that dark night as you appeared to be yelling and pinned down by a man. I should tried to intervene or to help you somehow in the moment, at least to see if you were okay.

25. I am going for a run and it is not okay for you to yell 'fucking hot' from your car as you anonymously drive by. It may be funny to you, but it's frightening and I lose my breath and I cannot start to run again for a time. And then when I do start to run, it is a full-out sprint until I can get home and lock my door.

26. It is just as much a violation of me when you break into my email and social media accounts as when you force yourself into my body against my will.

27. There is a reason my face looks so bitchy when I work out in the gym or when I travel the subway  alone at night. It is protection, not irritation or annoyance.

28. You do not have the right to grab me and kiss me just because we are alone in the book room and you are attracted to me.

29. Thank you for saying that what you meant to do in our relationship was show me how a man can treat a woman, but what you showed me is that a man can use a woman for sex for an extended period of time and still have no interest in cultivating anything deeper with her.

30. No, yours is not the biggest dick I have ever had and frankly it doesn't matter so lose the insecurity.

31. I will never forget that the only thing that made you want our child is that he turned out to be a boy.

32. No

33. No

34. No

35. No

36. No

37. No

38. No

39. No

40. No no no no no no no no no no NO NO NO NO NO!

41. There is no police report, Judge, because I was newly pregnant and scared and alone. I was scared of escalating his violent behavior. And I didn't want to cause trouble. And I just wanted him to go away. And no one taught me that going to the police would be the right choice of action in this scenario.

42. Mom, I am alone in New York and pregnant and I do not want this baby. I am going to have an abortion and I hope you will be able to support me in this choice.

43. I had an abortion and I know it was the right choice, but I still feel the trauma of loss.

44. Planned parenthood on Bleecker Street, I felt like a cog in your machine of abortion. Impersonal, no explanations, a room packed with women, not knowing what is coming next, being treated like a name on a listed that needs to be checked off. I think the process of the abortion traumatized me more than my decision to have one. And you let me go home alone.

45. To the courts of the world, to the men of the world, emotional and psychological abuse are just as destructive as physical abuse.

46. My whole life I have worked to assert control over my own body - in high school through starving myself, in my adult life through achieving a toned muscular physique in the gym...but I have not yet achieved the feeling that it is mine and mine alone to assert rights over.

47. My voice is connected to my body.

48. Don't yell at me with irritation and frustration in your voice, doctor, and tell me just to get the baby out of me. Even though this is my body, I have no idea how to do this, it is frightening, and I cannot feel the lower half of my body because of the epidural. And you are making it more stressful rather than less.

49. Just because you saw it in porn does not mean I want it or that I like it. And it doesn't make you 'better' at sex just because you replicate it.

50. Even though I am in my thirties now and even though I have had sex many times at this point, you still need to ask me if it's okay to touch me. You still need my consent.

51. You having an affair and lying about it to Mom and lying about trying to work on your marriage to us, your kids, does reinforce negative stereotypes about men, Dad. It does and you lost my respect. You had choices.

52. I am lying to you when I say that I am okay with this abortion. I am lying to you that it is because of our financial situation. You are not really counseling me in this situation nor are you really looking for anything more than my acquiescence to a lie so you can write down on a piece of paper that I received appropriate counseling. Can't you see that I am lying? I want this baby but I am scared of the man who got me pregnant and I am being forced into having this abortion by him.

53. I heard your sigh, doctor, when you confirmed that I want this abortion. I felt your judgment as I am older and educated. I felt you wondering why I am making this choice. I am not, but I am already lying on a table in hospital dressing and there doesn't seem to be any way back from here.

54. You do not get to say you have the 'right' to a second date just because you want one and I am saying no.

55. I just had a baby less than 24 hours ago. I do not want to give you fellatio. I cannot even believe you are asking. I cannot believe I am agreeing.

56. You think our sex was good, but mostly I was just scared and trying to please you.

57. I have written poems about men I have loved and about men that disgusted me. I never wrote you a love poem - you never inspired me.

58. I am a single mother by choice. There is no father.

59. I am a also a single mother not by choice. Stop saying things to my son like 'you can ask Daddy when he gets home' or 'your Dad will know' and listen to him as he so bravely and without shame explains, 'my Daddy does not live with me.'

60. I would like to be invited even though I am not part of a couple. I can still have intellectual, interesting conversations and I would like to be included. Maybe we could even become friends.

61. I felt so much shame going to WIC and needing that kind of help that I was never able to use the coupons that I so badly needed.

62. On our first date, we ended up in my bed with most of our clothes off and you on top of me. At that moment, I said, "I don't think we should have sex," which meant 'no' but was the politest way I could think of to say no. You said, "I am practically already inside of you, there's no turning back now" and proceeded to insert yourself in me. I remember after you were done, I told you you needed to leave, that I had to get up early. What I wanted to say was fuck you, I didn't want to have sex with you and I tried to tell you that. Later in our relationship, you would refer to me having sex with you on a first date, insinuating that I was a whore underneath all my 'proper' exterior. I should have recognized that as abusive.

63. Stop abusing me. Stop trying to assert control over me. I am not yours, we are not family, and the hurt you brought upon me has turned into anger has turned into action and will continue to be something I use for empowerment rather than victimization.

64. I did not know I was traumatized by the men in my life. I did not want to believe that could happen to me. I did not want to think I have been afraid to say things, but I have been. I am working on it.

65. I am just one small voice. But my voice is important and powerful and when I speak, I want to be believed. Remember, I hate drawing attention to myself.

66. I have a son. I do not want him to be 'one of those men.' I intend to speak to him now and in the future about sexual ethics, consent, emotional intimacy. I intend to tell him he never has the 'right' to have sex with another person. I intend to tell him about healthy relationships and gender dynamics and I hope I can guide him to be a man of integrity and genuine respect for women and men.

67. I intend to continue speaking truth to the world, truth to power, truth to all. I intend to lift up my voice, to make it loud when necessary, to be heard even if there are those who still will not believe me. I have more than 65 things I want to say but never have...and they keep coming and I will keep speaking...whether or not I am heard, whether or not I am believed or even listened to. Martin Luther King Jr. once said to be silent is to be an accomplice. I want to be better than that. And even though I say this and I do intend to do so, it is still scary. I still feel scared.

quiet in the silence

A thick falling snow always quiets the world. Even the howls of wind outside are muffled. This is our fourth or fifth, actually I don't remember how many at this point, blizzard of this winter. I am up early - well not actually. It is 7am and I was up a little before 6am. That has been my normal ever since my son started sleeping through the night. Up until he turned two, he was up at around 5am every day...and so was I. Now he is sleeping a bit longer, usually closer to 6am. But today he is asleep, along with my mother, and the house spread with quiet.

It must have been a long time since I have immersed myself in quiet. This uninterrupted, unbroken morning comes as such a relief, and yet a foreign one. I am so distanced from my former self, the one who moved through the world but not of it, for days, weeks at a time. I remember quite vividly my sorrowful year at a prestigious, yet isolated college in the northern hinterlands of New England. Yes, full of sorrow, and the interiority of loss built an enclosed space around me. I walked around as if in a tomb, going for days without speaking a word or interacting with another human being. When you step apart from the world, mute, everything does become quiet. Yet sorrow for what? There was no particular reason, no particular event. There was one boy with whom I had been close who was struggling with his own depression; he had withdrawn from the world and from me. But was that enough to cause the extreme sort of removal that I myself had initiated?

-----

I wrote the above two paragraphs two or three years ago when quiet was indeed a rarity. Now I sit, once again, worlds apart from a past me, under the weight of silence. My now 6-year old is spending his first weekend away from me with his father under a court order which came on abruptly and painfully. It is not truly silent - as usual, I hear the cars pass on the state highway outside our house; the air conditioner buzzes on and off; the hum of heat rising into the day vibrates itself through the closed windows; robins and chickadees sing their morning rounds.

No, it is the silence of oblivion, of absence, of what is but is not. I do not know this world without my son bumping around in his room when he wakes and then calling mellifluously down the stairs "Mommy?" It is the silence of you wake up and there you are, still alive, yet without all that you would call life.

I may seem melodramatic. Perhaps I am. The emotional anguish is the moment, though, building outward to fill the silence. I have twinges of what it would be like to lose a child. Their toys and papers from school and small pieces of string and tiny clothing all around, underfoot, within view...their voice never in earshot, the amplitude of their calls and laughter displacing none of your space. The composer Samuel Barber is quoted in an article in The New York Times (Oct. 3, 1971) as saying that "I can also tell you that one of the physical nurturing components that make my music sound as it does as that I live mostly in the country. I like being surrounded by nature. I have always believed I need a circumference of silence." In his case, he is filling the silence with music. The space of silence to create. The roundness of the shape of his silence embraces him and opens up, circling around from end to beginning, like the earth or the solar system. My silence is not a circumference unless it is a noose. The weight of silence already bursting with creation missing, with space like sky to atmospherically echo all you no longer have.

I wrote some untranslatable notes from my previously unfinished post - the weight of future pain, that of being a spectator...something about the recognition of my struggle making me feel a sense of loss. Oh me me me. The old me could entirely fill the silence with my own pain. The current me can too, yet now the pain feels valid, feels equally external and connected as it does interiorized whereas my sense of my older ineffable sorrow feels Werther-like, manufactured in order to romanticize the space of sorrow itself. The child I grew inside my body is gone - it is easy to pinpoint the silence now.

I admit that I was jealous of others' silence once. I wrote years ago: "It is so quiet this morning that I can hear others - my bachelor friend painting all weekend in one of the previous blizzards, the scratch of the brush on the canvas, the struggle of his self-expression, the space of making and doing, the sound of me making silence in his presence. And now they begin to destroy the quiet: my son coughing, the water rushing through the pipes, the floor creaking with the weight of my mother's footfalls upstairs." Now it is the silence that destroys. Friends have recommended I take its offerings, hold its hand again, let my own voice pulsate its thickened air. Can you find yourself amidst silence?

There is a room in Minneapolis which has taken the title of 'the quietest place on earth.' Away from the notifications, the headphones, the outside tainted by traffic, airplanes, and leaf blowers, the anechoic chamber allows for a space where noise is measured in negative decibel levels. Though some find the deactivation the room enables therapeutic, others become anxious or disoriented in less than an hour. If noise has been identified as a threat by the World Health Organization, why am I so terrified of the silence?

Steve Orfield who is the president of Orfield Laboratories explains: "Silence is the ability to step out of the world and to be passive." When you take away all of the noise, all of the stimulus, what returns is the opportunity for one to clarify oneself. This 'stepping into myself' is the silence I am afraid of, the silence that hurts. It is the me that is afraid of losing my son's need for me. It is the me that is not yet sure what I am again without constantly being a mother. It is the me who is so used to giving and interrupting myself that I am unacquainted with who I have become. It is the me ready to continue pouring me into every open glass rather than submerge into my own bath, feel the cool of the water on my soul, and begin to swim again. "The highest order thing we can give ourselves, we already own." In this case, Mr. Orfield means peace. For me, I am going to try to sit with the quiet in the silence, because it is the quiet of my own sorrow...once as again. It is the quiet of my fears and my deepest love. The gift of knowing myself is terrifying. I once sought it constantly and it was more terrifying then...because I could never find it; I could never nail it down. I am ultimately unknowable even to myself, a shifting, raw movement within the silence. I am not my son. I am not only his mother. I am sorrow, I am silence, and I am the noise, the voice I can make and the one that might be able to encompass the opposite poles of gentle and powerful. As Jason Rosenthal writes in his piece, "My Wife Said You Want to Marry Me," "loss is loss is loss" and when those of us prepare our loved ones for it in a way that invites new life, they can use that empty space to write a new story. As I prepare my son for a life that doesn't always include me, and prepare him with gentleness, support, and encouragement, my new story begins.

out of order

In a machine world, things break. They break and, because there are only specialized people who can fix them, they sit in said broken state, 'out of order.' There will be a sign, sometimes formal, sometimes hastily written by management, usually with a warning or apology - 'caution' or 'sorry'... but sometimes just the obvious, 'notice.' Yes we do.

But this was the secondary thought I had of the phrase. It first came into my head because of my life, the way my life has been out of order. I had a child before getting married. My career life is not stable and I am in the middle of my life. In fact, it feels as if I am at the beginning, fighting my way in, yet I feel way too old and experienced for that.

Is there something fundamentally dysfunctional about my life? Or is it just that there are never good moments for life to happen and sometimes, they can derail other parts of your life? I long for the more proper order - the job that leads forward, the romance, the honeymoon period, the announced and celebrated wedding, the children that come a few years later, two to three years apart, and then the onward march towards...towards what? Do I want this? Did I ever? Is it just the chasm between the order of others and the muddled nature of my life, my being my soul that echoes with constant vibration?

I don't know that I want the right order. I may carry less pain, it is true, but I also don't think I would reflect as much on life or have as much drive to leave behind a mark. The question remains though, with all that is out of order in my life, am I broken? If so, to whom should I apologize?

I rejoined my childhood church about a year ago. I did it completely for my son. I wanted to offer him the awareness of religion and more, the possibility of a supportive community if he so chooses it in the future. He has become attached, it is true, but the more I went, the more it began to take on a shape and a meaning for me. I took the time to sit with my thoughts...with the painful ones that I was so often pushing away. I began to think about what it would mean in practice to forgive those who have caused me the greatest pain. And the strangest thing started to happen. People started to reach out to me. One of the pastors invited me to join an Ekklesia group during Lent for parents with younger children. I never involve myself in things like that. But something has changed about me this year. With the losing of my job, my son getting sick with a sudden medical condition, and his father suddenly fighting for custody out of the blue, I have broken irreparably. With all the new cracks now showing, I am letting people in more.

There is a Japanese practice called kintsugi. Rather than throwing away a broken bowl or vase, it is repaired using liquid gold, thus highlighting the scars of the piece. The metaphorical suggestions are legion: to be broken is not to be useless, value can be added through breaking, scars create beauty in a wholeness built through resilience. What I have been presenting to others this past year is my brokenness...and I have found more genuine connection with others than ever before.

I revise my earlier question. I quite certainly know that I never wanted the right order of life. I railed against choosing a well-worn career path and falling in line with the established footprints. I felt such a life to be empty of meaning...whatever that was. I felt that, if I were to choose that path, I would die a little on each step. I never had dreams of a big wedding or even of having children. And I did choose otherwise. I wandered my way through my twenties, pushing away from my family in the only way I knew how - through distance and career possibilities of which they had little to no knowledge. I could be a field biologist. Or an environmental lawyer. Or an anthropology professor. These things I could own. They would be my footprints alone. Alone in the wilderness. I simultaneously pushed away from most human connections, thinking and feeling that I was not yet 'perfect' enough. In hindsight, I can see that, as much as I struggled against the conventions of society, they still defined my sense of identity and success. And my willingness to open up and engage.

But I did dream of someone finally seeing my "pilgrim soul," "the sorrows of my changing face" as Yeats once wrote. But everywhere I went to make my new footprints, I found myself and my struggles. As I have aged, I have often second-guessed my own choices - to attend painting school in France, for example, when I could have been making my way through law school into a secure career. I kept a journal at the time, though, and I see myself working through so many difficult issues. On Wednesday, February 14, 2001 (ironically), I wrote: "How strange a thing is happiness. I don't even know if I know what it is - sometimes it feels like I can barely tickle it with my fingertips and that's an incredible feeling. But here I am - at painting school in Provence...and everyone from back home tells me how jealous they are of me, how lucky I am to be here, and how happy I must be. Happy? I certainly realize and acknowledge that I am unusually lucky to have the luxuries of money and time to be able to come here. That is undeniable...but happy? No, it is hard being here - every day is trying just in the sense of needing to speak a different language or having to live in a family and culture that isn't yours...And, of course, people who say they are jealous never think of these everyday realities...but more that that even, they don't realize that when you have an experience like this that is so foreign to everything you know that you - or at least I do - spend so much of my time searching and re-searching my values, my goals, my being, my soul. God, these thoughts occupy my mind all day - and it's exhausting...and you also feel really lonely a lot - not terrible, painful, crying lonely, but just alone - that no one really knows you."

When I am able to put my current self back into the mind of my younger self, I feel much more compassion. Oh dear sweet self and your struggles. And how you wanted to figure all of life out before living it. I once had a professor who must have sensed some of himself in me who told me a story of how when he was attending UC, Berkeley he used to go sit on some rocks above the ocean and hope he could think through all the answers...and then one day he realized he just needed to act and figure it out as he went along. Similarly, Leslie Jamison has written of an alternative to the modern notion that our lives must be shaped by and built upon deep insight about the 'self.' She writes: "I'd come to worship self-awareness...[this] brand of secular humanism [urging us to] Know thyself, and act accordingly. [But] what if you reversed this? Act, and know thyself differently."

We live in a human world. Machines may break and be done for, but we live...often in the mud...usually breaking once, twice...perhaps a whole host of times. Some of us break more than others. I recall reading in Tobias Wolff's In Pharaoh's Army that he originally joined the army so that he could have as many experiences in life as possible...because that was the way he felt he could become a truly good writer. From my early twenties when I read that, until recently, that was my feeling too. I felt brave enough, strong enough...and I felt experiences would give me the most human experience possible. Now, on the other side of abortions and abuse and loss and estrangement from family and financial struggles, my feelings have changed. I feel guilty and naive for ever asking for so much experience. I would now like a bit less. Because there can be so many cracks that you don't even know where to begin with the bowl.

The fact remains, I don't want to be a perfect bowl. Those pieces of china sit idly in a cupboard missing out on life. I don't want to break into dust either. My 'out of order-ness' are the cracks in my bowl. You don't need to be cautious around me or sorry. You should take notice, as should we all. But I will stand in front of you with my cracks glued back together in gold in order to ask you how you are, how you really are. And you can tell me, in no particular order.